overheated power supply

Status
Not open for further replies.

jseber1982

Enterprise SCCM\SCOM
Messages
904
Location
Atlanta, Ga
i posted in the wrong forum yesterday, my bad.

Ok. i just set up my water coolin system. I ran 3dmark for a while, temps on everything were super. cpu was at 28*C, chipset was 28*C. I looked at my graphics cards temps, one was at 35 and the other was at 5, hmm 5?i was just like eh oh well no biggie, it still runs great. I have a 650watt power supply. I put a higher cfm fan in it a while back, ran great for 3 months. yesterday i decided to go ahead and run the fan at half speed to cut down on noise.

I ran 3dmark for a while, it started getting a it choppy, was getting worse and worse, so i turned the program off and was like hmm, why the heck is this getting jumpy. So i started a game to test and see if it was the program, and bam my computer turned off and i smelt crappy ozone comming from my psu. i then realized that it had probably overheated because the inlet was partly blocked by wires.

So i went ahead and tried again, the pc ran for 15 secs then i saw smoke come outa my scsi card. The smoke actually came out of the trace on the card that connected it to the pci bus. It was the -12v pin.

I ordered a new psu. now what i am tryin to figure out, since it was the -12v pin that fried on the pci card, do you think that other components are damaged?

Im not sure what a psu does when it overheats, does it overvolt or undervolt?send voltage spikes or what. If it messed the mobo up, when i plug the new psu in, it might go up in smoke too.

thanks
 
The fact that the PCI card fried indicates to me that the PSU voltage spiked, due to rapid capacitor discharge, prior to going nuclear. Get another PSU from a friend or another PC or just an old PSU: plug in the cpu, heat sinc, one stick of memory and video card and boot the system. Check first to see if the keyboard LED's blink once and the heat sinc fan should spin. you shold here one beep form the mobo indicating that the bios has properly loaded. If that happens, you should be in good shape. Remove the PCI card and round file it and also look at the bottom of the mobo at the location of the PCI slot where the card fried and check for any discoloration. Another trick you might want to employ is after a succesful boot in the minimal system I just described, test all of the power connectors to your mobo for voltage with a digital volt meter. you connect the black lead to thte psu case and then gently insert the red lead into the 20/24 pin and 4 pin atx power connectors. Pay special attention to each of the readings on the black ground wires. If you get any more than 10 milivolts (.0010) from the ground wires then you have printed board voltage leakage and you will need to replace the mobo if you get random errors or shutdowns during normal operation. :) If you don't have a digital volt meter go buy one. $30-40 at Sears and they can save you alot of heartache!!!!
 
cool i will give it a try, so if there isnt any discoloration on the mobo, that pci slot is probably still good? just found it odd that the thick trace on the pci connector is what fried, must have been a good deal of voltage
 
That would be a better sign that if thereis discoloration. Do the minimal configuration boot nand then tell m what happens.
 
doesntr surprise me though how it happend. it had to happen now that i installed the water coolin, will have to drain the whole system to take the mobo out
 
i put a new psu in.. the voltages looked decent except for the 12v. it was at 11.8. that flew flags up to me. so i tried installing windows,, the second it booted, it fried. oh crap. it might be my cdrom?? when it died the first time with the other psu, it did it when i started a game.

and i also had another revolation. when i put this mobo in this case, the stupdid case manufacturer put a standoff way up in the corner by default and didnt see it, it was right under the ps2 port. when i tried bootin, didnt work, i removed it, all was well.

shoot now it all makes sense,, least i think. befor, it ran good for hours,,,, and i didnt use a cd, i used a cd, bam died. and now it was good until i used a cd. when i tried ejecting the cd, it didnt wanna do it, it just sat there. hmmm what do you think? i think i might have it lol. and seein how the mobo is workin, you think the cdrom is all that needs replacin? besides the psu now.


wonder if i can rma the psu
 
my new resevoir is right above my cdrom, maybe something dripped in it or somethin, but hmm mct 40 is supposed to be non conductible, but i guess if it gets in there it can still screw stuff up
 
ugh i hate this smell, makin me feel sick lol. i jus set the smoke alarm off. I am rma'ing the psu to xoxide. I am confident that it is the cdrom now, if that is messed up, would it make the 12v drop?
 
now that i think about it..... maybe the smoke came from the back side of the cdrom and the psu just sucked the smoke through, i got the psu out, and it dont stink at all
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom